Prior to 247G, my perception of play, games, and game designs was fairly limited. I’ve been a long time, but casual, enjoyer of League of Legends, and as such have accepted the label as being a “gamer”. I’ve always known that my scope of games was severely limited, but that grew even more upon entering this class. The term “gamer” has a stereotypical image in current social views, but it’s vastly changing. Most evident of this would be from the Feminist reading and lecture, where I was asked to think more critically about who plays games and why that’s changing.
One of the most meaningful things I took away from this class is the meaning of a game mechanic. Again with my limited scope of League of Legends, I’ve often misunderstood mechanics to only be the “pure fundamentals” of a game. Within League that looked like abilities, fighting, farming gold, etc. While not entirely wrong, I had only consciously encountered it in a single instance. Learning about the MDA framework, invited me to reflect on all the past games I’ve played. These include flash games I’d play growing up, card and party games (it was really interesting to break down something seemingly amorphous like party games into game mechanics). With that, I started approaching how I saw games through a more critical lens, instead of intuitively gaining a feel for the mechanics, I’m now able to actualize and verbalize them much better.
Alongside with the MDA framework is the dynamics and aesthetics. Dynamics was really interesting to think about. Often I grouped it together with my previous understanding of “mechanics”, but it was far more complex than my broad definition. Isolating mechanics was easy, but recognizing how they interacted with each other was definitely a challenge. This went a step even further when we realize these dynamics evoke certain aesthetics. It’s not something I previously thought about, but again, something I could intuit. With this and many more, the class was able to give me stronger tools to critically think about and analyze games.
Perhaps, one of the most unique assignments in the class are critical plays. I’ve never been asked to play a game and talk about it afterwards for assignments. Thanks to the breadth of prompts, I was also exposed to a variety of games. Never in my life would I imagine playing Journey, Life is Strange, and One Night, Hot Springs all within a few weeks of each other. The variety of games I was able to play, but also learn about in class helped me learn that I’m not quite the gamer I thought I was. I have, in fact, not played that many games. Regardless, this class was able to help me better understand my place as a person who plays games, and give me a starting point for how to even approach making one.
